Yep, looks like it’s on the way, will be interesting to see it in the flesh.

Tom

-A different Sean.

Thanks.

Good to hear from you again, and yes, Twitter has eaten into my blogging time but in a good way. I post things on Twitter than before would have either remained in my brain or in the dark recesses of my del.icio.us account. I’ve become a fan of micro-blogging, but of course blog posts will always be necessary for the “bigger ideas”.

The other great advantage of Twitter is the people you get to know, not in a ‘yay, lets all be best-friends’ sort of way, more like how you get to know people you keep on coming across on school runs, or community events or product launches. Why not join up?

As for Excel/SQLite I’m bit by bit building something that I intend to release, mainly by refactoring ‘old work’ (which by the nature of what we do, tends to ‘hacked together’ to a get a specific job done) into something more robust and generic. I’ve been mainly doing it for myself (but they say the best software is that which “scratches the author’s itch first”) so making it public was not my priority – paid work and life-in-general comes first – but I’m starting to think that there’s a demand out there for such a product, and more importantly for the services associated with it, so I’ve started to invest more time in finishing it off to use as a marketing ‘hook’ for my paid work. So as they say, stay tuned…

Tom

I agree that Excel is “the” tool of choice for business. As such they want to send you files in Excel and want their reports created in Excel. So Project Gemini will be a big hit with serious Excel users.

I have not tried the Excel/SQLite combination you describe. Serious lack of expertise in VBA and C/C++ side are my main problem. Do you have a test prototype that you can share with the world that might help beginners like me?

Sean

Mmm… the post I intended to write next was where I explain Why Excel? (having already addressed Why SQLite?) but got side-tracked by the Gemini demo. Why I mix one of the poster children of FOSS (so free it doesn’t even have a licence!) with a spawn of the great evil one

Well I do so because, quite simply, Excel is the best tool for serious data crunching (and by the looks of Gemini, MS intend to fight to keep it so). If you wish to be seriously cool and show that money is no object you buy yourself a Mac (I know that, from the Macs in my children’s orthodontist’s office, matching the duck-egg blue Mercedes sports parked outside). Likewise if you want to crunch data in an optimal fashion use Excel (which implies Windows, as the Mac versions’ VBA – scripting is an essential datatsmithing tool – is either absent or nobbled; and of course the coolness you spent good money on would be seriously diluted by using Excel).

But using Excel doesn’t mean you have to buy into the whole MS stack no more than using Linux as a main platform excludes use of other platforms where they offer significant benefit. (It was the ability of Gemini to work outside of the SharePoint/SQLServer stack that appealed to me)

You could either use desktop virtualisation or install Excel on an EC2 image (not S3, S3 is simply a ‘file server’). The problem with an EC2 image would be the latency (European images are in Dublin), remote connection delays might take away many of Excel’s touch-feely-ness. I would think virtualisation would be cheaper and more effective. Excel being highly efficient in its use of system resources could also be run very effectively from XP powered net books (with an in-built encrypted backup/load to/from S3 for example)

As for OOo, SQLite or DerbyDB could be used as local document databases, but lacking true VBA support, many of the benefits of Excel VBA’s gigantic ‘open source community’ would be lost.

That’s my opinion on Excel today, but although I tend to have strong opinions, they’re loosely held, if the landscape changes (and I keep a very watchful eye on it) and an open source (of which I’m a “true believer”) alternative offers a “good enough” replacement, I’ll be the first to endorse it.

Tom

Great post and nice links – I can always rely on you to get me thinking or push me in the right direction.

So…. as someone who is committed to Linux (for better or worse we are on the track now) how can we access something similar? Over the web? From Linux?

Could I use this on amazon S3 or some other web service just for Clive and I to share?

Or should I be tapping you up for the SQLite functionality on S3 or in OOo?

Martyn